E-book sales in the US

E-book sales and daily tweet volume have tracked each other for fifteen years with the reliable synchronicity of two digital phenomena that were born in the same technological moment and have aged together like twins who went to different colleges but still call each other on birthdays. The correlation is 0.908, which is strong enough to suggest that the same device that enables reading also enables arguing with strangers, and that Americans do both with roughly equal commitment. The Kindle and the timeline: two rectangles, two consumption habits, one thumb.

Both 2020 surges run on the same fuel: the screen-time windfall of a locked-down population. E-book sales jumped sharply as physical bookstores closed and commutes vanished, while Twitter usage spiked as the platform became the newsroom-of-record for a confusing pandemic. Two very different reading habits, same extraordinary amount of sitting indoors.

Fifteen years of e-books and tweets growing together is a story about reading and writing migrating to the same screen. The device that replaced the paperback also replaced the diary, and both activities now compete for the same attention span. The book has a beginning and an end. The feed does not. The thumb scrolls on.